At 13:48 06/01/2011 -0800, Mike Gurstein wrote:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12130140
But not only to visit parents but to care for them mentally and physically
we learn!
Now that China is copying its way, technologically, into Western
consumerism, it is also discovering our fault lines -- including
governmental inadequacy (and ineptitude) in coping with welfare for the old
and the needy. The Confucian duty of caring for one's parents was fine
with multi-generational families on their own plots in older times, and
when 95% of the population hardly stirred more than 5 miles from their
places of birth.
It is rather reminiscent of Tudor England when the same phenomenon was
occurring -- when young adults started forsaking their parents in the
countryside and migrated into the new townships even if they couldn't find
work there. In those days, by a decree of 1536, their ears were cut off.
(More exactly, one ear was cut off. If they remained without a job or
didn't return to their parents, the other ear was cut off. If they still
persisted, they were executed.) It was a short-lived policy, however, and
the butchery disappeared within a generation.
So, I suspect, will China's neoConfucian proposal.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
<http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2010/12/>http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/01<http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2010/12/>/
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